Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter - Mario Vargas Llosa [165]
She was all excited, her eyes shining with joy. I felt that I loved her very much and was happy to be marrying her, and as I waited for her to wash her hands and comb her hair in the common bathroom down the hall, I vowed to myself that we wouldn’t be like all the married couples I knew, one more disaster, but would live happily ever after, and that getting married wouldn’t stop me from becoming a writer someday. Aunt Julia finally came out and we walked hand in hand to the city hall.
We found Pascual and Javier standing in the doorway of a café, having a cold drink. The mayor had gone off to preside over an inaugural ceremony of some sort, but would be back soon. I asked them if they were absolutely certain they’d definitely arranged for Pascual’s relative to marry us at noon, and they made fun of me. Javier cracked jokes about the impatient bridegroom and made a terrible pun: “Better wait than never.” To pass the time, the four of us strolled around the Plaza de Armas beneath the tall eucalyptus and oak trees. There were some kids running around chasing each other and some old men having their shoes shined as they read the Lima papers. Half an hour later, we were back at the city hall. The secretary, a skinny little man with enormous glasses, passed on the bad news: the mayor had returned from the inauguration, but he’d gone to have lunch at El Sol de Chincha.
“Didn’t you tell him we were waiting for him for the marriage ceremony?” Javier said reprovingly.
“He was with a group of people and it wasn’t the right moment,” the secretary replied with the air of an expert in matters of etiquette.
“We’ll go find him at the restaurant and bring him back,” Pascual said to me reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Don Mario.”
By asking around, we finally found El Sol de Chincha, near the Plaza. It was a typical provincial restaurant, with little tables without tablecloths, and a stove at the back, sputtering and smoking, with women bustling about it with copper pans and pots and platters full of wonderful-smelling dishes. There was a phonograph blaring out a Peruvian waltz at top volume, and the place was full of people. Just as Aunt Julia, standing in the doorway, was starting to say that it might be more prudent to wait till the mayor had finished his lunch, the latter recognized Pascual and called him over to his table in one corner. We saw the Panamericana editor being greeted with a big hug by a rather fair-haired young man who had gotten up from a table with half a dozen other people, all men, sitting around it, each with a bottle of beer in front of him. Pascual motioned to us to come over.
“Of course—the fiancé’s—I’d completely forgotten,” the mayor said, shaking our hands and looking Aunt Julia over from head to foot with an expert eye. He turned to his companions, who contemplated him with servile expressions on their faces, and informed them, in a loud voice so as to make himself heard over the waltz: “These two have just eloped from Lima and I’m going to marry them.”
There was laughter, applause, hands reaching out to shake ours, and the mayor insisted that we sit down with them and ordered more beer to drink a toast to our happiness.
“But you’re not to sit next to each other—you’ve got all the rest of your life for that,” he said euphorically, taking Aunt Julia by the arm and seating her next to him. “The right place for the bride-to-be is here beside me, since luckily my wife isn’t here.”
Everyone at the table applauded his little joke. All of them were older than the mayor, merchants or planters dressed in their best, and they all appeared to be as drunk as he was. Some of them knew Pascual and asked him how things were going for him in Lima and when he was going to come back home. Sitting next